Sixteen years after World War II ended, Gershon Young of Chicago, a survivor of some of the Nazi’s most notorious concentration camps, walked in to a courtroom in Aurich, Germany, to testify at the war crimes trial of Dr. Werner Scheu for his role in the massacre of Jews in Lithuania.
Gershon Young (Family photo.)
Then, he immigrated to Chicago, where he met a kind beauty named Bernice Gruber and proposed. During 60 years of marriage, “She was like a mother to me,” he said. “She made what I am today.”
They had two daughters, Litz and Merra Young, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. He called them all “zeeskeit” — sweetness.
Mr. Young died of pneumonia in June at the Park Plaza Jewish Senior Living Community, Litz said. He was 92 and had worked in sales for 41 years for Capitol Hardware Mfg. Co.
In the oral history, he recalled how, on June 29, 1941, the SS came to Kvedarna “in black dress clothes” and rounded up the Jews, forcing them to board trucks.
He never saw his mother Merra or his two sisters Masha and Tobie again, he told the Shoah Foundation. His father Shia was with him for a few weeks in the Heidekrug work camp in Germany until the “young beasts” of the SS took him, saying they were sending Shia Young and other men, including the town rabbi, back home.
But after the SS members returned, “They brought the clothes back from the dead people,” Mr. Young said. “Just imagine that, the heartache that we went through.”
School days in Kvedarna. Young Gershon Young is second from the left in the front row. Family photo.
cheu ordered captives transferred to the largest Nazi extermination camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, where Mr. Young had his arm tattooed with an ID number: 132747.
People were divided into lines. Some were put on a truck. Mr. Young asked why. More experienced Jewish prisoners, conscripted to help, told him: “The people who went on the truck, they told us, were going to go into the oven.”
In 1943, he and other prisoners were sent to Warsaw to clean up the ruins of the failed uprising in the Jewish ghetto. He contracted typhus. “When I came out of there, I only weighed about 70 pounds. I was — they called it a muselman, a skeleton.”
An uncle in Chicago spotted his name on a survivors’ list and sponsored him to come to the United States.
He met Bernice Gruber at the Max Straus Jewish community center in Albany Park.
The engagement photo that prompted the nattily attired Gershon Young’s future in-laws to say their daughter Bernice was “marrying a gangster from Chicago!”
The only time they were apart was during his trip to Europe for the trial of Scheu. As age led to hospitalizations for Bernice Young, Judy Litz said, “he saw her like a bride,” pushing her wheelchair everywhere.
Services have been held.
Post courtesy of the Chicago Sun Times